Drought Has Settled On The Town Of Peaches, California The Area Of The Central Valley Where Fourteen Year Old Lacey May And Her Alcoholic Mother Live Was Once An Agricultural Paradise Now It S An Environmental Disaster, A Place Of Cracked Earth And Barren Raisin Farms In Their Desperation, Residents Have Turned To A Cult Leader Named Pastor Vern For Guidance He Promises, Through Secret Assignments, To Bring The Rain Everybody Is Praying For Lacey Has No Reason To Doubt The Pastor But Then Her Life Explodes In A Single Unimaginable Act Of Abandonment Her Mother, Exiled From The Community For Her Sins, Leaves Lacey And Runs Off With A Man She Barely Knows Abandoned And Distraught, Lacey May Moves In With Her Widowed Grandma, Cherry, Who Is Concerned With Her Taxidermy Mice Collection Than Her Own Granddaughter As Lacey May Endures The Increasingly Appalling Acts Of Men Who Want To Write All The Rules, And Begins To Uncover The Full Extent Of Pastor Vern S Shocking Plan To Bring Fertility Back To The Land, She Decides She Must Go On A Quest To Find Her Mother, No Matter What It Takes With Her Only Guidance Coming From The Romance Novels She Reads And The Unlikely Companionship Of The Women Who Knew Her Mother, She Must Find Her Own Way Through Unthinkable CircumstancesPossessed Of An Unstoppable Plot And A Brilliantly Soulful Voice, Godshot Is A Book Of Grit And Humor And Heart, A Debut Novel About Female Friendship And Resilience, Mother Loss And Motherhood, And Seeking Salvation In Unexpected Places It Introduces A Writer Who Gives Flannery O Connor S Gothic Parables A Californian Twist And Who Emerges With A Miracle That Is All Her Own

Chelsea Bieker is from Californias Central Valley She is the recipient of a 2018 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award and the author of two forthcoming books, the novel GODSHOT April 2020 and the story collection, COWBOYS AND ANGELS 2021 Her writing has been published in Granta, McSweeneys Quarterly Concern, Catapult, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, The Normal School, No Tokens, Cosmonauts

10 thoughts on “Godshot”

It hurts Get used to it, she said Women have a long history of suffering How to describe this book well, it s a book about women and girls About mothers and daughters, and the often difficult relationships between them about what it is to love so deeply a mother who has failed you About religion and the way it can be used to control women s bodies It feels dystopian due to the claustrophobic, s

Whatever s happened to you can either make you beautiful, or it will ruin you forever You decide I mean, beautiful I mean, deep and changed Affected Wise When you see a woman like that, you know She s beautiful because of her undoing Beautiful because she rebirthed herself from ashes Chelsea Bieker s Godshot is a dynamite of a debut novel about the true grit of girlhood under the long arm of reli

This is a perfect novel From my blurb on the cover, which I mean with my full heart Chelsea Bieker s Godshot is an absolute masterpiece A truly epic journey through girlhood, divinity, and the blood that binds and divides us, it is a feminist magnum opus of this, or any, time Bieker is a pitch perfect ventriloquist of extraordinary talent and ferocity Imagine if Annie Proulx wrote something like White Oleander cross

Updated, actual review 1 18 20 I received an ARC from the publisher, opinions are my own.This book is so surprising on so many levels It s about a teenage girl named Lacey May who lives in a drought ravaged town called Peaches in California s central valley A good chunk of the town is under the spell of a glitter loving pastor named Vern, who uses the permeating scarcity of resources and desperation of people whose agricu

This book is well written, and I liked the flawed and well rounded characters, but I m to the point where I cringe when I see a book described as feminist simply because of how often that translates to terrible things happen to women, and they might have a few victories and eventually get to show their strength, but mostly it s just a series of bad things happening to them over and over I m clearly in the minority here based on the o

The loneliness of a monster can only become sentimental after it is dead.Godshot by Chelsea Bieker is a tightrope walk of a novel, with each chapter you slowly step further from normality and the madness takes over No safety net can save you from falling for this intoxicating debut that is than just a coming of age story for one young girl, it s a journey into life, a breaking free of everything once known and trusted Written with prose t

I m not even sure what to say about this heart wrenching debut It s taken me days to collect my thoughts When Lacey May s alcoholic mother leaves her for a stranger who promises to make her a star, fourteen year old Lacey goes to live with her eccentric grandmother Cherry who is obsessed with dressing her collection of rodents Peaches, California is experiencing a drought, but fortunately Pastor Vern has guaranteed his congregation that he can produce